Archive of Our Own

When Professor Teieri Anri’s syllabus for her graduate paleontology seminar advertised Australia as the location for the class trip (paid for via strategically applied research grants), Isagi Yoichi imagined it would be the best free, paid-for vacation in the world. He would frolic in the white sands of Bondi Beach, snorkel in the Great Barrier Reef, and take cute selfies with koalas. Instead, after a ten-hour flight from Tokyo to Sydney and eight hours in a rental minivan, he’s in the middle of nowhere in New South Wales and trapped in a car with his sworn enemy-slash-epic-rival in Todai’s Department of Earth & Planetary Science: Itoshi Rin. Itoshi fucking Rin, the darling of the department and voted the best-looking guy in the Graduate School of Science at the University of Tokyo. 

The worst part? Rin has been snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef before and has the shirtless swimming photos on his Instagram to prove it, taken from another paid-for research trip for his undergraduate thesis a couple years ago. No, the selfies with the colorful fish and the turtles are not cute. And no, Isagi hasn’t been looking at Rin’s profile every time he’s bored of the desolate wasteland that is the Australian outback outside the car window.

“You should really confess,” Bachira leans over and whispers, the sound of the car making it so Rin can’t hear from the front passenger seat.

 “Stop it,” Isagi says, as they pass another exit sign before the endless wasteland outside the window continues again. 

Rin clears his throat. “We just missed our exit.” He has the kind of voice that carries even though he isn’t loud.

“Did we?” Ego drawls, unconcerned. “I’ll just take the next one. Itoshi-kun, help me navigate.”

“Whatever,” Rin says. Isagi’s sure he was an edgelord when he was a teenager.

What Isagi knows about Itoshi Rin when he’s not trying to outdo him academically mostly comes from the five years they’ve stayed in the same cheap, crappy boardinghouse together, next door neighbors on the first floor. Rin ended up in the boardinghouse because like Isagi, his parents lived just far away enough from Todai’s Bunkyo campus that commuting back and forth would be a pain. Rin’s family hails from Kamakura, and every time he goes back home to visit his parents, he brings back a big box of fresh crepes and a rotating selection of seasonal desserts from his parents’ wagashi store that the rest of the boys in the boardinghouse go Lord of the Flies over. Isagi thinks Rin enjoys sitting back and watching the chaos despite his seemingly expressionless demeanor. 

Other facts in Isagi’s mental model of Itoshi Rin: Rin goes for a morning swim most days. When Rin makes ochazuke in the boardinghouse kitchen accompanied by the drip-drop of water from the leaky roof, he leaves extra in the fridge and labels it with a Post-it with Isagi’s name after Isagi confessed he didn’t know how to cook and had been living off instant ramen to save money. Rin refuses to let Isagi pay him back for the food. Rin loves horror movies and books, and Isagi once caught him enraptured in a English-language fanfiction for IT by Stephen King. (Rin refused to answer when Isagi asked what Archive of Our Own was and was the closest Isagi had seen him to blushing.) Rin is confessed to a lot, but has turned down every single one, boys and girls alike.  

What everyone else notices about Rin: that he’s the younger brother of the legendary Itoshi Sae. Itoshi Sae got into Todai when he was fifteen, went to Princeton for his doctorate at twenty and is an associate professor in astrophysics in Switzerland at ETH Zurich, which is best known for being Albert Einstein’s alma mater outside the scientific community. Sae is currently the youngest tenured faculty member at the school. 

The other stuff about Rin, nobody notices. Whenever he introduces himself in a class at the beginning of the semester, the first question he gets is, So you’re Itoshi Sae’s little brother? and Isagi wants to snap at them and say, You don’t know Rin at all. He’s not just Itoshi Sae’s brother. He’s a bit of a jerk, but he’s my jerk. 

The car lurches as Ego exits the highway onto some country backroad. Isagi’s stomach does a somersault. 

“Isagi,” Bachira says, “are you okay? You’re not looking good.”

“You should have asked for my carsickness pills before we started,” Rin says from the front. His tone isn’t unkind, despite the outward harshness of his words.

Isagi clutches his stomach. “Ego-sensei, can we pull over for a moment?”

*

Twenty minutes later, they make it to their destination, a clean but sparse hotel in Lightning Ridge, New South Wales, Australia. Isagi steps outside the car and stretches before hopping around to get his land legs back. Rin looks at him funny.

“What?” Isagi asks. “Don’t judge.”

“I wasn’t,” Rin says, already looking around at the landscape instead. So Isagi follows suit.

The land looks like they could be on Mars, the earth in dull shades of red and brown. They’re practically astronauts. Hopefully no catastrophe happens like in The Martian. 

“What if some giant monster alien shows up? Or zombies?” Rin asks, and Isagi remembers that he is the biggest horror fan in the world. 

“I could survive any zombie apocalypse,” Isagi says. 

“I’d outlive you.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You’d be too busy trying to fight zombies because you’re always the reckless one when we play co-op mode.” 

“Lies.”

Isagi laughs. Rin tilts his head. Nobody else thinks so, but Rin is funny, if only you know how to read him. Isagi and Rin were banned from teaming up together in co-op mode in Splatoon. Everyone said it wasn’t fair that they always won. 

“Hurry up, you two lovebirds,” Ego calls out, halfway to the building with Bachira already.

*

To save money, Ego declares, hands on his hips to rally all the tired grad students and their European collaborators like a general rallying his army after Anri tries and fails to herd the cats that the grad students secretly are, they’ve decided they would be staying two to a room. Apparently, there was a Google Sheet. Isagi doesn’t remember ever seeing it. He must have hit delete when he was too tired from crunching numbers in the lab and debating with Noel Noa, the visiting professor who’s serving as his Master’s Thesis advisor. 

“We made sure to book rooms with two beds to prevent any rom-com situations,” Ego states. “Get some shut-eye—tomorrow will be a long day."

“Who do you least wanna room with?” Bachira slides over to Isagi, energetic despite the all-day long journey and the five days of arduous labor and learning they have ahead of them. 

“Michael fucking Kaiser,” Isagi says, when he spots Kaiser and his ugly hair in the other side of the lobby talking to his crony Alexis Ness. Kaiser had started an argument over him at a geology conference in Norway over how Isagi’s graphs didn’t have clearly labeled axes that had ended in the one and only time Isagi had hate-slept with anyone. 

Rin is glaring at Kaiser. Someone else snorts from nearby. Isagi turns to find everyone from Todai looking like they’re in on an inside joke.

“What?” Isagi asks.

“Isagi,” Chigiri says, taking pity on him. His hair is tied up in a ponytail that’s starting to come undone. Chigiri looks like he’s about to fall asleep at any minute, speaking slower than normal. “Check your email. Teieri-sensei just sent it, because she and Ego forgot earlier.”

“That’s why I couldn’t find it.”

Isagi opens the attachment, room_assignments.xlsx. The first row: Isagi Yoichi, column A. Itoshi Rin, Column B.

“Great,” Isagi says. “It’s not Kaiser, at least.” 

Nagi strides over with Reo to look Isagi dead in the eye and says, “Make sure to use protection,” following that up with nothing else. 

“Yeah, Isagi,” Reo says. “Safe sex is important.” 

“I told you once, I’ve told you a million times, I do not have a crush on Itoshi Rin!” Isagi yells, before turning around to find none other than Rin glaring at him, two hotel key cards in hand. “Ahem. Sorry. Lovely day today, Rin.”

*

Here is a brief list of things that Isagi is currently not, in order from least to most important (Michael Kaiser always insisted that all numbered lists in scientific papers be organized from most to least relevant): Isagi’s face is currently not burning from humiliation. Isagi is not the reason why he and Rin get lost and somehow keep ending up at the courtyard of the rickety hotel. Isagi is definitely not in possession of something as childish as a crush on Itoshi Rin.

“What?” Isagi asks, when Rin stops a step behind him. 

He can’t see what Rin’s up to right now, but Isagi can sense he’s looking around. He and Rin have always been weirdly in sync, so much so that even Barou Shouhei has commented as such. When Isagi is working in the library and Rin happens to also be there, they have a silent agreement that they will sit at the same table, pounding away at their laptop keyboards in harmony.

“I think the room’s in the hallway behind us,” Rin says. 

The way Rin says every word is definitive and authoritative. Isagi isn’t sure they’re friends, but they’ve known each other since they were both undergraduate first years at Todai, fresh from high school and not addicted to caffeine yet.

Rin was someone Isagi had always looked up to. He made challenging physics homework seem effortless, and his solutions were so graceful and concise the professors released them to everyone after the fact as the official solution sets. His parents hadn’t been scientists, but he came in just leagues above everyone else. Supposedly, he had scored the highest score in the country on the national mock college entrance exam. And then Isagi would bump into him at the gym sometimes, and his body was just as flawless as his mind. Rin is a believer that having your body in tip-top shape keeps the mind in the best shape possible, and if Rin said it, it has to be true.

“Okay, fine. You can lead the way,” Isagi says. Rin doesn’t smile, but his mouth twitches.

Rin opens the door to Room 131 after a quick walk back. Nothing remarkable. There is a small desk, a small bathroom, and a chair. One abstract painting hangs on the wall but no more decoration. Rin dumps his luggage to the side and flops onto the single chair provided, looking at Isagi expectantly.

“What now?” Isagi asks.

Rin points at the bed. Bed as in a singular bed. Preventing romcom situations, indeed. 

“Do you think Ego did this on purpose?” Rin says, and Isagi is busy wondering whether his question is rhetorical or not, when Rin gets up. “I’ll go ask the staff to see if we can change rooms,” Rin adds. “You should brush your teeth since you threw up earlier.”

*

“We’re taking up all the rooms with two beds,” Rin declares when he returns, with the conviction of a king.

Isagi is already in his pajamas and ready to sleep after today’s travels. “Are you saying we’re stuck with one bed?”

“You have a problem with that?” Rin says it like a challenge before opening up his suitcase, stripping right in front of Isagi, who covers his less-than-virginal eyes too late to catch an eyeful of the planes of Rin’s arms, his back, his chest. When Isagi opens his eyes again, Rin is in his pajamas, and he flops onto the bed.

“Do you snore?” Isagi asks. Loud noises wake him up easily at night.

“How kind of you to ask. I don’t. But I do tend to move around in my sleep.”

“Cool,” Isagi says. "I can deal with that.” 

When he turns around, Rin’s eyes are closed, and his breathing is already heavy. Rin is already normally calm. Asleep Rin is a new level of calm. Isagi chuckles. Rin could be almost cute. Almost.

*

Day 1. 

Word had spread overnight about Isagi and Rin’s predicament. Isagi sure as hell didn’t share the details of the one bed situation with the group chat, but when he and Rin show up downstairs together, side by side, everyone starts whispering. Isagi had woken up to Rin practically sprawled on top of him like a starfish. 

“How’s the lucky couple?” Reo asks.

“Says the guy who calls his boyfriend ‘my treasure!’ all the time,” Isagi says, taking one of the weird Australian snacks Ego had prepared for an improvised breakfast. “Did you and Nagi have two beds in your room?”

“Just one,” Reo says. “We swapped rooms with Chigiri and Bachira so they could have two. They also got screwed over—there’s a tour group from America taking up most of the other rooms in the hotel, so they ran out of two-bed rooms.”

Bachira slings an arm over Isagi’s shoulder. “Isagi,” he sing-songs, “ready to go fossil hunting?” He glances around, and Isagi follows his gaze to see that Rin is talking to Ego. “This is the perfect chance to impress Rin, you know? I hope you packed the right clothes for the occasion.”

Isagi laughs, scratches the back of his neck. “Why would I be trying to impress Rin?”

“Isagi, Isagi, my dear, dear friend. Don’t play shy,” Reo says. “You’re not a good liar. Plus, Rin likes you. Everyone knows that.”

“He does?”

“Don’t play dumb.” Reo huffs. “If you want, I can send you the color-coded Google Doc of evidence we’ve all compiled over the years.”

“He uses the evidence as inspiration for his fanfics he writes for English practice and lets Chris Prince beta—” Nagi starts.

Reo claps a hand over Nagi’s mouth. “Nagi, don’t tell them!”

The thing is, Isagi has never been quite sure whether Rin thinks of him as a friend or just someone he’s willing to tolerate for an extended period of time. 

The first class they were in together, the professor had paired them together for a group project, and Rin had been so above Isagi’s level at that point that Rin became Isagi’s goal. But then the differences had mellowed out a few semesters later, and when they later both became tutors for underclassmen for the core School of Science requirements, there had been a point when Rin asked Isagi—of his own free will—how to best explain Lenz’s Law to a first-year student. Because it made intuitive sense to Rin, he struggled with how to explain concepts to other people. And then Rin finally noticed him. It wasn’t until a few months later, after Isagi beat him at Smash, that he finally called Isagi by his name. Since then, Rin has been his rival, more or less. They both ended up both sticking around for graduate school. They’ve both been stressing about PhD program application results the past couple months. 

Isagi knows that like him, Itoshi Rin has big dreams. Rin’s dream used to be to beat his brother—he had started out in geology since that had been once his and Sae’s dream, to map out the history of the Earth together by studying the seas and the land and the skies. But after a particularly tense conversation when Sae visited the boardinghouse during their first year, Rin has stopped mentioning beating his brother. Isagi discovered from another school trip to Oga Park in Akita that his new dream is to unravel all the secrets the land and the oceans have to offer before it’s too late and glaciers have melted, all the small details that on their own are meaningless and tiny like pixels but together have kept the Earth moving for millions of years.

Itoshi Rin could get a Nobel Prize if he put his mind to it. Isagi doesn’t doubt for a second that Rin will succeed at whatever he puts his mind to.

*

On Day 1, they tour the museum before heading out to look for fossils in the dirt. This trip is unusual for graduate Earth & Planetary Science Department trips in that none of the students are studying paleontology, so the good thing is that none of them are expected to know anything. There were a few papers the students were supposed to have read before today. Nobody has read them. 

So instead, they spend a couple hours in a local museum catching up on the local fossil types that they were supposed to have read. Why scientists care about Lightning Ridge, why it is a special fossil site is because the fossils are opalized—instead of rock gradually replacing bone over millions and millions of years, the bones of formerly living creatures have become opal. Local opal miners were the first to discover the wealth of fossils decades ago, years before the paleontologists arrived. 

“I think it’d be cool to become an opal one day,” Bachira says. 

“You’d be sparkly like Edward Cullen,” Chigiri says, while looking at an exhibit. 

Isagi wanders after getting tired of opal after opal. Is there such a thing as too much beauty in one place? The gift shop beckons. He feels bad for Rin and decides to buy him a gift because of the whole one-bed thing. He buys Rin a dinosaur keychain. 

He gets in line behind a man, and in front of that man is Rin. Isagi tries to communicate with him telepathically that he’s behind him. Spoiler—it doesn’t work. Rin doesn’t notice him until he finishes up, turns around, eyes coming to rest of Isagi. He waits at the exit for Isagi to check out.

“Rin, what did you buy?” Isagi asks once they’re both done. 

“Nothing,” Rin says, a little too quickly.

“Aw, it’s okay. We’re all nerds here, you know?” He lowers his voice. “I won’t judge if you bought a geode.” 

It’s an inside joke—the first time he and Rin did their boardinghouse Secret Santa, they both received geodes. That’s all everyone thinks geology majors want, as if all they care about when it comes to the Earth are sparkly rocks. Science had actually been Isagi’s worst subject at school when he was young, but after seeing the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake on the news, he knew he was put on this planet for one task and one task only, to study how the plates of the Earth moved and how to keep make sure that the next time an earthquake of equal magnitude appeared, to mitigate the sheer devastation. 

Rin huffs. “Isagi. Who do you take me to be? I didn’t buy a geode.”

“Too cool for geodes, are you?” 

Rin rolls his eyes. “What did you buy?”

“Nothing,” Isagi says. 

Rin levels him a flat glare, as if to say, See? 

*

For the rest of the trip, everyone on the trip learns the value of zinc sunscreen and sunglasses under the unrelenting sun. On the third day, Isagi squeezes out too much sunscreen from the bottle, lets Rin have his extra, feeling how cool Rin’s hands are when they touch. 

Lightning Ridge is also famous for its hot springs, so hot that it feels almost like freezing. Isagi can’t stay inside the water for more than ten minutes. In the hot springs, Rin is at peace in his natural element, the water. Isagi gets why Rin studies oceans. He exudes calm when he isn’t mildly pissed. Isagi sits next to him, and they just sit there together, watching the others trying to outsplash each other until one of them gives up and decides the water is too hot. 

Everyone discovers at least one fossil at the mine—there are just so many in the piles of discarded dirt from the opal miners and from the surface of the mine itself. Isagi has found a fossilized imprint of a plant and a small snail, frozen in time in opal. They learn that the Griman Creek Formation is a major fossil site for dinosaurs, plants, and early mammals. For dinosaurs in particular, it has been a treasure trove of dinosaur fossils from the early to mid-Cretaceous period, so around a hundred million years ago. 

When you study geology, you learn that you are nothing. You, the human, exist for only a tiny blip on the Earth, this ancient, unknowable thing. You live there for your three-month stay. The Earth is the fifty-year-old building that isn’t up to code with the loud neighbors and is falling apart in places but still keeps on going. We are all at the mercy of an elderly landlady equally prone to kindness and cruelty depending on her moods, and fossils and rocks are just nature’s version of a disorganized budgeting Google Sheet, each fossil a row in the million-line spreadsheet of what else has lived on the planet, a ledger of every other tenant ever having lived in the rickety building.

Today, their last full day looking for fossils, Rin has chosen to wear a sleeveless shirt. Isagi woke up and discovered Rin’s arm had snaked around him that night. Rin is examining a fossil under a magnifying glass off to the side, talking with Reo. After their conversation, Rin puts down his fossil in favor of his water bottle, throwing his head back as he chugged and Isagi blinked a couple times because he had been zoning out.

“Isagi, stop checking Rin out,” Nagi says, tonelessly as usual. “It’s starting to get creepy.”

“For the last time, there is nothing going on with me and Rin!” Isagi drops the brush he’s been using to clean off an opalized fossil, a tooth that might be from an extinct horned turtle of the Meiolaniidae family, if the guidebook is right. 

“Not according to Reo,” Nagi says. 

“Hey, Isagi,” a familiar, curling voice says, and Isagi turns around to find Rin, who always happens to be there at exactly the wrong damn time. With him is Reo, who is grinning.

“Ego said I could borrow the rental car tonight,” Rin says. 

“Uh. Great?” He has no idea where Rin is going with this. “I didn’t even know you could drive.”

“Did you think Ego could drive nine hours by himself?” Rin snorts. “You were asleep when I took over. There are car tours around Lightning Ridge—I can drive around some of the scenic spots.”

“Oh my god, Itoshi Rin is taking Isagi Yoichi on a date!” Reo hollers for literally everyone on the trip to hear, before clapping Isagi on the back. “Congratulations, my man.”

Rin’s expression hasn’t changed, but Isagi can detect that he’s nervous in the way he’s gripping his water bottle tighter than normal.

“Sure, I’ll go with,” Isagi says. 

Rin’s hold on his water bottle relaxes.

*

Isagi has been on a couple of school-sponsored data-gathering trips, but the last time he was in the desert was last spring. He and Noel Noa traveled to California to collect data from the Garlock Fault, a large fault that runs north of the more famous San Andreas Fault and cuts inland into the vast plains of the Mojave desert, where he could yell and nobody for miles would have heard him. The outback is just as vast, and Isagi wonders where Rin is planning to go. 

“Hey,” Rin says, backpack slung over his shoulder, waiting for Isagi at the entrance of their one-bed hotel room, leaning on his right leg, jangling car keys in his hands. “Ready?”

“Always,” Isagi replies. 

And he and Rin are off, taking the car tour right before the sun sets. The Golden Hour is the best time of day to take photos, and Rin, whose hobbies include landscape photography, has brought a tripod in his backpack. They slow down at each stop on the driving tour to marvel at the rugged landscape. Rin makes them stop every time, sets up his tripod to get shots, asks Isagi to pose in front of scraggly trees. 

“Let me know how they turned out. I needed a new profile picture anyway,” Isagi says.

Rin nods deeply, as if Isagi having a good profile picture is a matter of life or death. Isagi chuckles. 

The final stop is a bluff overlooking the barren landscape below. They park next to a large tree that looks like something out of a painting before getting out of the car. Isagi takes a deep breath to smell the fresh air.

“Wow,” Isagi says, drinking in the scenery. “It’s beautiful, don’t you think?”

Rin doesn't respond, but the repeated sound of his phone camera shutter going off is confirmation enough. The sun has already set, and the sky is the blue of twilight that Rin once taught him photographers called the blue hour. The blue hour suits Rin, brings out his green eyes in the blue of twilight. 

Rin is something of a marvel to look at, a bit like the Earth itself. His name means ‘cold’ and he might first appear that way on the outside, but Rin is anything but cold. On the inside, like the Earth and its molten core of over five thousand degrees Celsius, Rin is burning. One only needs to take a look at his photography Instagram and the fact that his videos are the most popular on the Blue Lock YouTube channel that Bachira and Isagi made to explain tricky scientific concepts to the general audience to see how much passion he has for science.

Rin takes out a picnic blanket from his backpack and lays it out on the hard ground. They sit there in silence, close enough to hear each other breathe, as the blue hour ends and the stars come out, waking up for their nightly bacchanal. Stars and stars fill the sky, and despite the lack of streetlights, it is almost as bright as Tokyo. So many stars. As much as Isagi loves his hometown Saitama, a suburb of Tokyo, he wishes the light pollution wasn’t as bad.

“Hey, Rin. Do you know any constellations?” Isagi asks. Given that his brother was into astronomy, there was a decent chance he would.  

“I don’t know any of the constellations,” Rin admits, as if he knew Isagi was about to ask. He’s not apologetic about that fact at all, which makes Isagi laugh.

“That’s okay,” Isagi says. “I can only pick out Subaru. I think they call it the Pleiades outside Japan.” He points to the cluster of seven stars. “See?”

Rin nods solemnly, as if the matter of where the Pleiades are is one of grave importance. The stars twinkle at them as if in gentle laughter.

“Thanks for bringing me here, Rin,” Isagi says.

They are sitting so close that their knees are brushing, and Rin turns to face him in the eyes.

“Can I ask you something?” Rin asks, and Isagi is shocked because Itoshi Rin never asks for anything from anybody.

“Yeah.”

“Were you and Kaiser ever serious—”

“What? He’s not important.”

Rin scowls, and Isagi adds, “What’s wrong? You don’t like hearing about me and Kaiser, do you? Or are you secretly homophobic?” Despite his friends joking about him and Rin constantly, Isagi doesn’t even know if Rin is into guys or not. Rin keeps that part of his life private and has succeeded wildly beyond expectations, despite their crew of nosy friends.

“He needs to fuck off back to Germany,” Rin says, before raising an amused eyebrow. “Secretly homophobic? Honestly, Isagi, I would have assumed your gaydar would have picked up on me by now.”

“So you’re into guys.”

“No shit.” Rin’s tone isn’t annoyed, though, but rather amused. “I’m in the school’s LGBT Book Club. We’ve been reading every queer horror novel I can get my hands on and recommend.”

Isagi mulls over this fact. He’d seen Rin at the library before, reading a book, and this explained it. “Can I ask you a question?” 

Rin doesn’t object, so he asks, “Why are you in Anri’s paleontology seminar?” 

Isagi knows why he’s in the class. It sounded cool and he didn’t know that much about fossils before, so reading papers with Anri seemed like a fun way to expand his knowledge. But Rin, his undergraduate thesis was about coral reefs, and he was in Greenland earlier this year to collect data for his Master’s thesis about glaciers, so it didn’t make sense to Isagi why he was in this class when his other classes this semester were about oceans.

Rin opens his mouth without saying anything, and Isagi figures he must be thinking how to phrase this.

“I don’t know if I want to keep studying water,” Rin says, which doesn’t make sense, because he’s The Water Guy in their year in the geology department. “Inside the ice cores there are all these weird viruses that have just been frozen in there for thousands of years. The ice is all melting—who knows what kind of shit that’s going to unleash onto the world? Same with coral reefs. They’re dying, and I hate that all this work I put in, everything I do, is going to be wiped out by what’s happening. I didn’t sign up for this to be a historian of something dead and gone. Ego suggested I should try something different.”

“I’m sorry,” Isagi says, because he’s had similar thoughts too, about his work on earthquakes only being relevant today because earthquakes will keep happening, since humans haven’t been able to create technology to destroy Earth’s core. “I hope you’re enjoying the paleontology class, at least.”

“It hasn’t sucked,” Rin says, which means he’s enjoyed it.

Rin is so close, and Isagi can smell the scent of the free hotel soap on him from the shower he took after they finished up digging. His gaze dips to Isagi’s mouth. Isagi closes his eyes, learns in—

“Oh my god, don’t make out in front of us!” Someone yelps, and Isagi blinks to make sure he’s heard right.

Rin’s face is flushed and he’s visibly annoyed, eyebrows scrunching up. Isagi stands up, makes out Reo and Bachira and Nagi and Chigiri, barely concealed by the large tree he and Rin passed by earlier.

“Go fuck off,” Rin says, standing up. “We were here first.”

“Ego sent us to make sure there wasn’t any hanky panky in the wilderness,” Reo says. “He said to keep it inside so you don’t get bitten by a deadly spider while in an, ahem, compromising position.”

“Good job, Isagi,” Bachira stage-whispers loudly. “I’ll tell Kaiser you’re over his sorry self for good.”

And his meddling friends have ruined the moment. They wave as they leave, clearly satisfied with having completed their mission, and Rin shakes his head, waiting until Reo drives them off. 

“Isagi,” he says. “Let’s go.” 

So Isagi follows him back to the car in case someone else shows up.

“I’m gonna kiss you first,” Isagi says, as soon as the doors close and Rin growls.

“Fuck no,” he says. “I’m going to win.”

Isagi laughs and laughs, and he leans in to kiss Rin. It feels so natural, him and Rin like this, in a cold car under the stars in the Australian outback. Rin tastes like a challenge. He is a good kisser, but Isagi wants to be the best kisser, and Isagi wants to be the only one to see him like this, disheveled and arms and legs jutting awkwardly as they try to get as close to each other as they can, until they hear the rumble of another car’s engine, some random other tourists arriving.

Rin clears his throat. The moment is over.

“Let’s go back,” he says.

“I’m starting to think Ego had a point,” Isagi says. “Let’s continue this at the hotel?”

Rin nods, reaches for the car keys again. Isagi grins.

*

The next day, they have to drive back to Sydney to catch a midnight red-eye flight back to Japan. Isagi is awake to see Rin take the wheel this time, listens to him humming to songs on his hand-picked playlist as they slowly make their way back. On the flight back, Karasu lets Isagi swap seats with him without any argument. Rin lets Isagi rest his head on his shoulder. Isagi will miss waking up without the mystery of where Rin’s limbs will be sprawled in the morning.

When Isagi wakes up, the plane is landing, and he catches Rin taking a selfie.

“Who’re you sending it to?” Isagi asks.

“My shithead brother Sae wanted a picture of my boyfriend,” Rin says. 

They haven’t talked about whether they’re dating for real or if the trip was just a one-off thing, so Isagi smiles. Rin makes it sound so simple. Rin is his rival and his boyfriend, more or less, someone living in the same hall during their tenancy in the ricketty old building of their home planet. They could be nothing but opalized bones someday, the only thing left of their time on this planet, and what wouldn’t Isagi pay to see how alien geologists explain away why they were found together?

Isagi laughs after noticing a necklace with a single large opal dangles around his neck that wasn’t there before. The tag from the gift shop is still attached. Smiling, he pulls out the dinosaur toy from his pocket, feels Rin’s cool palm as he examines the dinosaur toy. Isagi likes how Rin doesn’t make a big deal of how he feels but instead acts on it in a thousand little ways. He could get used to it. 

“Send the picture to me,” Isagi says. “I’ve gotta tell all my high school friends and my parents that I’m taken, so they know not to keep setting me up whenever they hear a friend’s son is gay.”

Isagi tugs on Rin’s cheek. Rin rolls his eyes but lets him. 

“Of course,” Rin says. “Can’t let anyone else get to you first.”